Meanwhile, we have
attempted to alleviate psychological disorders with a bewildering variety of
methods, harsh and gentle: by cutting holes in the head and by giving warm
baths and massages) by restraining, bleeding, or « beating the devil
« out of people and by placing them in sunny, serene environments; by
administrating drugs and electric shocks and by talking-talking about childhood
experiences, about current feelings, about maladaptive thoughts and behaviors.

One can now state
with certainty the chemical composition of Jupiter’s atmosphere, but when it
comes to understanding and treating what is much closer to home we are only
beginning to make progress. The therapies clinicians favour depends on the most
persuasive explanations of the disorder. A catalogue of all the therapies that
have been tried at one time or another can, however, be organized with only two
main sections: the psychological therapies (therapies that involve
verbal interaction between a trained professional and a client with a problem)
and the biomedical therapies (therapies that alter the structure or
functioning of the nervous system).

The major
psychotherapiesare
derived from familiar psychoanalytic, humanistic, behavioral, and cognitive
perspectives on psychology.

The goal of psychoanalysis
is to help people gain insight into the unconscious origins of their disorders
and to work through the accompanying feelings. To do so, analysts draw on techniques
such as free association and the interpretation of dreams, resistances, and the
transference to the therapists of long-repressed feelings. Like psychoanalytic
theory, psychoanalysis is criticized for its after-the-fact interpretation and
for being time-consuming and costly. Although traditional psychoanalysis is not
practiced widely, its influence can be seen in therapists who explore childhood
experiences, who assume that defense mechanisms repress emotion-laden
information, and who seek to help their clients achieve insight into the root
of their problems.

Unlike
psychoanalysts, humanistic therapies tend to focus on clients’ current
conscious feelings and on their taking responsibility for their own growth.
Carl Rogers, in his person-centered therapy, used active listening to express
genuiness, acceptance, and empathy. With Gestall therapy, Fritz Perls sought to
break down people’s defenses and to make them accept responsibility for their
feelings. Many therapeutic techniques can also be applied in group therapy.
Behavior therapists worry less about promoting self-awareness and more about
directly modifying problem behaviors. Thus they may countercondition behaviors
through systematic desensitization or aversive conditioning. Or they may apply
operant conditioning principles with behavior modification techniques such as
token economies.

The new cognitive
therapies, such as Ellis’s rational-emotive therapy, Beck’s cognitive therapy
for depression, and Meichenbaum’s stress-inoculation training, all aim to
change self-defeating thinking by training people to look at themselves in new,
more positive ways.

The Biomedical
therapiesinclude
psychosurgery, elecroconvulsive therapy and drug therapies. Although
controversial, a growing body of evidence indicates that ECT is an effective
treatment for many severely depressed people who do not respond to drug
therapies which is the most widely used of biomedical therapies. Drug therapies
include the antipsychotic, antianxiety, and antidepressant drugs.

Psychotherapies
and biomedical therapies tend to locate psychological disorders within people
and thus seek to remedy the disorder by changing the person. Another way to
view many psychological disorders is an understandable response to a disturbed
and stressful society. According to this view, it is not just the individual
who needs treatment, but also the social context in which the individual acts.
Better to prevent the problem by reforming a sick situation than to await and
treat the problem